Thursday, December 13, 2007

Ed Love upside down curly mouths and Clinton Oafs

Ed Love is one of my favorite animators. He had a varied career. He worked on 30s Disney cartoons (I just realized some of my favorite Disney cartoons have his animation in them), 40s Tex Avery and Lantz and TV Hanna Barbera cartoons. He really has his own style of movement.

When I was a kid I recognized his style 2 ways:1) Upside down curly mouths2) His movements were more fluid than the other animators. -he did fully animated HB commercials too! I'll show some later

Upside Down Curly Mouths

Mixing different animators with different layout artists

Here are two animation drawings by Ed Love. They have different proportions. The one on top is more even and tastefully on-model. The one below is more awkward and dumpy.

The one above is probably layed out by someone like Dick Bickenbach who drew everything with even pleasing gentle proportions. The one below is by Walter Clinton who always drew Fred (and other men) dumpy and oafish, which is funnier to me.Above: Bickenbach

Below: Clinton

There is a ton more to be said about Ed Love, and I will in further posts. This was just to give you a quick superficial clue to recognize his work from the drawings.

Do you think it's funnier for a guy to have four or six fingers? Five fingers are just too boring. I love Fred's expression when he sees the hand that's bigger than the last guy's. It's Priceless. Please do more posts on Ed Love.

"2) His movements were more fluid than the other animators. -he did fully animated HB commercials too! I'll show some later"I can't wait to see those, especially since "Hey, There, It's Yogi Bear" appeared to be fully-animated (to me, at least).

Slightly off-topic: I know that you'd probably grill on me for mentioning this (Or at least be disgusted by it. I know you can barely watch one of these), but I've seen Ed's name on some of the Tom and Jerry cartoons. I'm sorry if I'm potentially offending you.

Anyways, those Flintstones drawings (especially the ones drawn by Walt Clinton) are just priceless! I'm assuming that the framegrabs with the blueish, grayish rock tint are from season one.

The Clinton fred is a world away from the Bickenbach drawing. Clinton's so much weight, and solidness the the figure and lots of line-flow in all the shapes. The other looks like a stilted textbook diagram of how to assemble a cave-man. 1)Draw a barrel 2)stick i ton 2 perpendicular legs 3)attach paper cut-out arms 4)jam a melon on top 5) there should be a necktie th hide the seems

"Slightly off-topic: I know that you'd probably grill on me for mentioning this (Or at least be disgusted by it. I know you can barely watch one of these), but I've seen Ed's name on some of the Tom and Jerry cartoons. I'm sorry if I'm potentially offending you."

On second thought, I believed I confused Love with Ed Barge. Sorry (again) about that.

Goddamn! These drawings are fantastic. Those oafs amaze me. I'm gonna have to research Walter Clinton. His drawings rule!

I've heard about Ed Love I think in Kevin Langley's blog or Thad K's blog. I really liked his style of animating in this one Woody cartoon. It was so alive that I completely forgot I was looking at an animated cartoon character and thought it was kinda real (Is it a bad thing to think that?).

Anyway, thanks for sharing some more awesome Flinstone frames and animators, John!

Those Walt Clinton drawings are great! I would've never have picked him out in these cartoons but now I can see it. His best work was with Tex. The unit with him, Lah, and Simmons is my all time favorite.

Maybe I'm mistaken but didn't Clinton also do layouts for Tex around the same time Gene Hazelton did? A lot of those Spike shorts seem to be closer to Avery's drawing style than earlier stuff laid you by Claude Smith or Louis Shmitt.

The scenes which I've seen of Fred taking part from the Prinstone University American football team (with the Walter Clinton's layout), are from the episode Flintstone of Prinstone, which makes part of the second season (1961-62) from the Flintstones classical series (Hanna-Barbera/Columbia Pictures, 1960-66). The sequence of the football match from this episode, wasn't animated by Ed Love. Don Patterson animated this sequence. Another detail which I've on this sequence from the football match, it's that was included on the background music, an university fanfare which doesn't have nothing to do with the Hoyt Curtin's original music score from this series. This fanfare seems which was produced by John Seely. I doubt...

I could notice that Ed Love also was involved on the Flintstones spin-offs, such as: The Peebles & Bamm-Bamm Show (1971, not credited) and The Flintstones Comedy Show - in the USA - or The Flintstones Frolics - the international title (1980, not credited). I could recognize his animation style on these spin-offs (besides of him being not credited). Alias, Ed Love was also involved in the animation of two Hanna-Barbera productions where you was involved in the layouts: The Smurfs (1981-89) - which you hated to do the layouts - and the 80s version from The Jetsons (1985-88) - which you loved making the layouts.